


at the end of everything

by yunmin



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi - Fandom
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 15:22:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13033980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunmin/pseuds/yunmin
Summary: After the events ofThe Last Jedi, Leia and the Resistance find Wedge Antilles.[contains spoilers for The Last Jedi]





	at the end of everything

**Author's Note:**

> I have so many feeeeeeeeeeeellllliiiinnnngggggsssss. [here be spoilers, you really have been warned.]

The Millennium Falcon lands on an old, old, old Rebellion base; on Atollon, the forgotten refuge. Even Leia Organa has never been here before. But there’s a man, and a couple of ships, there to greet them.

Wedge Antilles has been officially retired for fifteen years, but has never stopped working for the Republic. He’s one of the few people who’s ever done it any good, so Leia had left him there, instead of pulling him into her fight. She’d always known he’d come to her aid if she ever asked.

(And a tiny, small, sliver of her heart had been hurt that he hadn’t come charging to her rescue, on Krayt. But she has no confirmation he ever got her message, and he was only one man with one ship, and could not have stood against the First Order’s army.)

A message had come in, as the Falcon had drifted through space – and through time itself it seemed – on an old Rebellion channel, sent in the short-code that was devised in the earliest days in the Alliance, a forerunner to the Fulcrum protocols. _Come home_ , it had said. _Rebuild_.

And so the Falcon had gone.

“Chopper Base,” Leia Organa announces, to those who maybe don’t know their early Rebellion history. Chopper Base was formed before the Alliance was even signed, when the Rebellion was still a mess of disparate pieces; Commander Sato and Phoenix Squadron on Atollon, General Dodonna’s flight group at Yavin, the Tierfon Yellow Ace’s, what would become Twilight Company, and then Mon Mothma leading the fight in the Senate before her flight. “Welcome to one of the founding sites of the Alliance.”

It’s a fitting place to come home to.

Leia busies herself with her duties. Wedge busies himself with his, directing the meagre scatterings of what is left of the Resistance. The few surviving pilots flock to him like baby birds to a nest, recognising a kindred spirit and a man who can provide solace in hard times. Dameron stops at her side, the man no doubt feeling no end of guilt about whether any of his decisions could have lead them to a place other than this. “Ma’am,” he says, finally ready to defer to her, at the moment when he has proved himself that he should no longer need to.

Leia almost laughs at the irony.

“Go on, Poe. I know you had a poster of him up on your wall when you were a kid.”

Nearly every one of her pilots did. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, they had all been heroes, and pilots, and respected for their trades, but every one of them had had their fame as a pilot eclipsed by some other factor of their being. Wedge Antilles was the pilot’s pilot, the consummate soldier, who’d kept his head down and worked and yet been there, willing to sacrifice everything when the time was right.

Poe Dameron meets Wedge Antilles for the first time on the ground of Atollon Base, nervously approaching as a subordinate. He’s met by Wedge, who has heard tales of his actions, as an equal.

Finally, when everything is sorted, it’s just Wedge and Leia left, standing in the shadow of the Falcon. He’s a little stiff, uncomfortable, but he’s always looked that way out of his X-Wing. Leia remembers the man who’d stood at Endor clutching his helmet, and had offered Luke a handshake instead of a hug – or a kiss, as he really should have done. Wedge had loved Luke dearly.

Leia wonders whether the galaxy would be shaped differently today, if Wedge had kissed Luke at Endor instead of letting those feelings stew unresolved for all those years. They’d had a relationship, a semblance of one, somewhere in the years that followed, but it had never quite worked as it should, for two people who loved each other so deeply.

And now Luke is gone.

“I’m sorry,” Wedge says.

“What for?” Leia asks.

“About everything,” Wedge answers, and Leia can sense the grief and the shame that radiates off him; for not convincing Luke to stay, for not being able to find him, for not standing beside her in the Resistance, for the fall of the Republic, for Han’s death, for the Resistance being brought to near annihilation.

“Not your fault,” Leia says, and she steps forward to embrace him. He returns the hug, cradling Leia in his arms, keeping her close and safe.

“I heard about Han,” he says.

Leia just nods into his shoulder. So many losses have piled on top of that wound, one that cut deep and to her very core. She can’t talk about that, not even to Wedge, who’d wagered money in the base-wide betting pool and had held her when she’d cried in the months where Han had been frozen in carbonite.

“And I heard…” A note of hope enters his voice, and Leia knows what he’s going to ask her, and she has no good news for him. “Luke?”

“I sent someone after him,” Leia says, and she wonders whether the pain she feels at not going herself will ever die. “But they couldn’t bring him back. He gave everything to our last stand.” Leia’s aware of the contradiction in her words. “And now…”

It was so easy, to say it to Rey. She’d known. Wedge draws away, dread in his eyes, the realisation of fears that have dogged his every step for eight long years finally come to pass. “He’s gone, Wedge.”

Wedge shakes his head, ready to deny it, but somewhere inside of him he knows that Leia would never lie to him, not about this. His scepticism turns to anguish in mere moments, and he crumples against her, tears flowing freely down his face. Leia lets him cry, lets him shed the tears that she herself cannot quite wring out. “We’re the last of them,” Leia says, stroking Wedge’s hair akin to the way one would soothe a small child. It’s not entirely true; Calrissian is out there, somewhere, off in the Unknown Regions, uncontactable and chasing ghosts. There are still a few around who could claim they served in Rogue Squadron. But the heroes from the old days are dying, and their children will fight the war that their parents could not end.

Leia’s unsure how long she stands there, holding Wedge. She can understand his grief, in part, though at least she got a semblance of a goodbye; Wedge is bereft of even that.

He pulls through it, eventually. Wipes the tears from his eyes. He really isn’t all that much taller than Leia is, so she doesn’t have to tilt her head the way she does with some people. “Come on.” She offers him her hand. “We have a Galaxy to save.”


End file.
